


his conscience, clear

by notavodkashot



Series: FFXV one shots [21]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Build up to treason, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Introspection, Unreliable Narrator, all great coups started somewhere
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-06 04:07:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21220298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notavodkashot/pseuds/notavodkashot
Summary: It's only treason if you lose. In his mind, every traitor is a hero in the service of the greater good.





	his conscience, clear

* * *

_ “All a man can betray is his conscience.” ~ _ Joseph Conrad.

* * *

“You’re going to die out there.”

Luche looked up to find Captain Drautos standing by the windows, arms folded behind his back. There was an edge to him as he stared - unseeing - over the skyline, back ramrod straight and feet perfectly set at parade rest.

“Sir?” Luche asked, lowering his tablet to his lap, head slightly tilted to the side.

“There’s rumors among the hunters,” Titus said, catching Luche’s eye in the reflection of the glass for a moment, before he went back to staring at a far off point in the distance. “Something big is coming, something too big to be stopped. But no one cares what the hunters say, and the King will not be swayed by rumors. So he’ll send you out there, regardless of my concerns on the matter, and you’ll die for nothing.”

Grim as the words were, Luche reckoned he was the only one among the Glaives who would ever hear them. It was both price and privilege for standing at the Captain’s right and knowing that, when he spoke, it was the Captain’s voice the others heard. He’d been seventeen when he’d knelt before the King and received his magic, and by the time he was twenty, he’d already been chosen to serve directly under the Captain. Luche knew some of the sneering he got, particularly from the likes of Crowe Altius, came from supposed favoritism. The Captain trusted him, and they knew it. More than that, they hated it, but in the end, the best they could come up with to explain it was favoritism. Luche was far too thick skinned to let the implicit dismissal of his place in the hierarchy to heart. He almost understood it, even. He knew the measure they used to gauge him and his performance, for all no one would ever say it out loud. He knew, and he wasn’t bitter. They saw Ulric’s skill in the battlefield and reckoned they’d much rather serve under him than Luche himself. Sometimes, he felt like they’d rather serve Ulric instead of the Captain, and that was why Luche didn’t think much of it, since anyone with that oppinion couldn’t be anything but shortsighted. They liked him better, the so-called hero of the Kingsglaive, with his ridiculous stunts and his penchant to take upon himself the blame, regardless if it was really his own.

Once upon a time, Luche was willing to admit, he’d have felt the same way too. He’d have preferred a charismatic leader to follow, one who threw himself into danger and damned the consequences. But working under Captain Drautos, Luche had learned better. A leader was more than an arrogant disregard for orders and the romantic idea of facing impossible odds and still trying anyway. A true leader, Luche reckoned, was someone who measured his actions carefully, who thought critically and understood he could not risk them all for the sake of one or two stragglers. Someone who didn’t treat them as disposable, but knew and accepted that they had signed away their lives when they had joined the Kingsglaive. That, in the long run, they were tools entrusted to his hand, to make their lives and their deaths worthwhile.

Nyx Ulric was a hero and a legend and not worth the dirt in the Captain’s boots, as far as true leadership went.

“You’ll lead the squad,” Titus said, when the silence lingered too long, and Luche realized he had nothing smart to reply to the Captain’s bitter tirade. 

He sounded like himself again too. Composed. He didn’t acknowledge his words, and he didn’t tell Luche to hold his tongue about the slip either. Of course not. He knew where Luche stood; at his right, always.

“And call the retreat,” Titus added, after a moment, finally turning away from the window, “when the time comes.”

* * *

It was as the Captain said it would be.

It was  _ always  _ as the Captain said it would be.

Luche watched the imperial troops retreat, teeth carefully and consciously not clenched – it made the tendon in his jaw twitch when he did that, and the Captain had trained him out of such an obvious tell a long time ago – and refused to feel petty when he included Ulric’s latest dashing antics in the report, even though he didn’t have to.

“What’s going to happen now?” Luche asked later that night, sitting in the Captain’s office as they wrapped up the report for that battle.

It was the Captain’s job to prepare those reports, since they went straight to the King. But for over a year and a half, Luche had been involved in the process. He was involved in a lot of the Captain’s duties, administrative and otherwise. He led in the field and the training ground, and deep down all knew it: Luche was being groomed for command.

The Captain wouldn’t say it out loud, of course, lest it caused resentment or unrest among the ranks, but they knew.

Luche knew.

“In the best case scenario,” Titus said, after a lengthy pause, “what you fought out there will be enough of a wake-up call for the King to summon the Old Wall and command it to march against the Empire.”

Ulric, Luche thought snidely, would certainly bank on that outcome. Because he was a chronic gambler who refused to acknowledge the game was rigged against them from the start. He would probably expect to march right along the Kings of Old, as if one man could make a difference when the stakes were so high. But Luche was not Ulric, and Ulric was going to spend the foreseeable future on gate duty, and maybe that would remind him what Insomnia thought of heroes and all the good they did. It probably wouldn’t, to be honest, because Nyx Ulric was far too enamored with his own grandiose bullshit to see the truth of things, the way Luche did.

And that was why it was Luche, rather than Ulric, for all his charisma and skill and strength and heroics, who was the Captain’s second in everything. 

“And the worst?” Luche asked, because he was smart enough to know which way the wind was blowing, but also because the Captain had that look on his face, his lip twitching with the ghost of a snarl that he was far too well-trained to show.

“The King will betray us,” Titus said, and he did not sound like the Captain when he did, but rather old and tired and bitter, the kind of bitter he’d once – only once – told Luche he should avoid becoming. “To save himself. To save his son. Anything Niflheim demands, he will grant, so long as his son goes untouched.”

* * *

“He didn’t tell you,” Luche said, didn’t ask, as he stepped into the Captain’s office after Crowe left with her classified Tenebrae assignment.

The Captain looked up at him for a moment, expression carefully blank, and then shifted in his chair, the posture familiar and almost… open.

“No,” Titus replied, holding Luche’s stare with his own, “he did not.”

Luche licked his lips.

“And we’re just… going to let it happen,” he said, frowning, because he knew the Captain, and he knew that the twitch in the corner of his mouth meant there were things he wanted to say that he wasn’t, because it was improper for the Captain of the Kingsglaive to say them. “Just like that.”

Fortunately, the Captain trusted him enough to be more than just the Captain.

“Just like that,” Titus said, the ghost of a sneer on his face. “Anything else would be treason.”

He was angry, Luche realized with a jolt. As angry and furious as Luche was desperately pretending he wasn’t – he was being groomed for command, and commanders were not supposed to crack under pressure. Not the way Libertus had snapped in the briefing room, for instance, and damn it all, Luche reckoned he was made of sturdier stuff than Libertus Ostium. Those were his men that had died, year after year, for absolutely nothing. Of course, he was furious.

But there was that thing still, wound tight around him, like cobwebs wrapped tight around a wasp, growing tighter the more he struggled with it. Something he wasn’t saying but which Luche could almost feel out the shape of, staring at the Captain’s stern face. Something monstrous and unspeakable and… and not something to be shared, not without trust. Absolute trust, even.

Luche swallowed hard.

“Is there a time, Sir, when treason is called for?”

The Captain smiled.

It was not a kind smile.

“Yes,” he said, sharp and certain.

Luche weighed the words and felt like he was back at the training grounds, standing at the edge and preparing to jump for the first time, sure only of one thing; death or success, no other options.

And still, now as he had then, he leaped.

“Is this one of those times, Sir?”

And just like then, now, too, he stuck the landing, after a moment that felt almost disastrously too long.

“Yes.”


End file.
